Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday October 04, 2012 @07:50PM
from the calling-all-ads dept.

Revotron writes "Readers of Entertainment Weekly might be shocked to find their magazine is a good bit heavier than normal this week. US-based broadcaster CW placed an ad in Entertainment Weekly which uses a fully-functional 3G Android device, a T-Mobile SIM card, and a specialized app to display short video advertisements along with the CW Twitter feed. Writers at Mashable were willing to geek out with a Swiss Army knife and a video camera to give us all the gory details as they tore it down piece-by-piece to discover the inner workings of CW's new ad."

Seconded... they can't figure out that basically, a directional style type navigation device is missing and they keep trying to navigate with what is clearly a spot for the android home, search, back, menu hotkeys.

Only thing I was interested in was, can you take the SIM out and will it work in another device?

T-Mobile does have monthly prepaid plans [t-mobile.com] so I'd expect it is something like this, paid for a month starting at the time they put these things together, which means they probably have a week or so left on them now.

Keep in mind you're going into this, slouched back in your chair, with full knowledge that this thing is an Android phone.

They're delving into this for the first time expecting maybe a more sophisticated version of the Esquire eInk cover. [makezine.com] The last thing they expect is to find a repurposed phone with pretty much all the hardware intact. Plus they're recording it live. They're figuring out things on the spot and thinking out loud so it won't be a boringly quiet video. If you had the magazine ad in front of you and picking it apart, you too would be saying or thinking a series of "what/why the fsck is that piece there?"

This is the result of G4, "TV for Lamers" I mean gamers...buying the once great TechTV (prior to that ZDTV), and filling it with games, rap videos, anime, and boobiez with a minute bit of tech thrown in. Of course, we can credit them for causing Leo Laporte to create TWiT and Kevin Rose to create Rev3, however I still miss ZDTV and TechTV myself.

Yes, this is cool, but I can't go out to Barnes and Noble and pick up a copy of this week's magazine and expect to find some fun electronics inside.

Entertainment Weekly is only producing 1,000 of these digital advertising-enhanced issues, so if you want a nearly free smartphone that, with a good deal of nudging, actually works, you better run, not walk, to your nearest newsstand.

I would argue that successful marketing, by definition, is a scam. It's about tricking you into thinking things you wouldn't ordinarily think, want things you wouldn't ordinarily want, and dislike things you wouldn't ordinarily dislike.

I agree. It got me to run downstairs and check the shelves of our news stand. The woman had an adorable smirk and playfully started in with, "Hmm, lookin for the fancy one! Sorry!" Ultimately it led to a fun couple minutes of conversation, a little bit of exercise, and me flipping through a magazine I've never looked at before. For a "scam" I really don't feel very scammed. In fact, I think my day is better for it.

Actually, the iPhone, while not strictly "original", was a MASSIVE step forward in the smartphone world. At the time, the next best thing was the Treo which came with one of two crappy operating systems, and had a low-rez, stylus based touchscreen. At the time, watching SJ's keynote announcing and demonstrating the iPhone was a gigantic "Holy Shit I Want One!" moment for people like me who were trying to make real use of the smartphones of the time and being constantly frustrated by their limitations. (I

If you custom-build a board, and cost-engineer it so that it just has the components you actually need, you are spending a whole bunch of money up-front (mostly, the salaries of the engineers who do the custom board design). This will pay off if you ship a large volume. This up-front cost is called "NRE", for "non-recurring engineering costs"; the final cost of your product is NRE divided by the number of units you ship, plus the actual cost of the unit (parts and assembly).

If you know you are shipping exactly 1000 magazines with this gimmick inside, a custom board makes no sense; the NRE would totally wipe out the per-board savings. The cheapest option would be a stack of pre-built boards that someone has lying around, maybe from a phone that was current technology two years ago. It wouldn't surprise me if the ROM contains an off-the-shelf build of Android, just with one additional app installed and set always to run at boot-up. They could have built a custom ROM image of Android, for example with the phone app removed, but why bother? (And clearly the phone app was not in fact removed, as the Mashable folks used it to place a call.)

what about the LIVE SIM card and not removing the phone app removed and rest of the OS can put the CW on the hook for all kinds of phone fees and they better hope some does not say pick this up and goes out side of the usa and then CW is paying like $20 a meg for data.

Yes, because if the OS is exposed, all sim cards are in rape me mode?First of all, roaming is something you must enable on the sim card profile, this can be restricted by the pin2 code and/or on operator level.Secondly, depending on technology on the operator side, it's fairly easy to restrict the card to x MB of data and disable mobile calls.

As I said in reply to another post.
I'm fairly confident is a A810 Wcdma 3G they are using.
It cost about $35 when buying a single unit. But you could get it for less than $25 if you buy at least 500.
I think we may see more of this...

I don't know who this mashable guys are, but they are truly fucking stupid. It took them 10 minutes of staring at what was OBVIOUSLY a fucking smartphone mobo in order to realize that it was one. And they sounded surprised!. Hey, you said it was playing video and receiving tweets, so what the hell did they expect it to be, a vacuum cleaner? They also looked at what was clearly a phone camera, missing the lens and with the CCD exposed, and they where like "is that a CCD, I think it looks like a CCD. Dude, you've got something shaped like an smartphone motherboard, with a smartphone battery, a smartphone LCD, a SIM card, and a USB port, and you wonder about what it is? The funniest part is that the article introduces them as "The technical wizards at Mashable". WTF.

You've obviously never broken down mystery technology before. It's very easy to armchair QB when you have a headline in front of you saying "TELEVISION NETWORK EMBEDS ANDROID DEVICE..." These folks didn't have that benefit. You're suffering from a commonly experienced psychological phenomenon called "hindsight bias." [wikipedia.org] The fact is, in 10 minutes they took the device and were able to largely ID it. That's pretty good.

If you think you can do better, by all means open a tech website, have a better product to ap

Shouldn't you ask what I do for a living before assuming it doesn't involve tearing apart unknown devices?

I own a software development company, and a big part of my day is bringing in weird shit from china, tearing it apart, figuring out what it is, how it works, identifying where it came from, going up the chain until I get to the actual manufacturer, then negotiating a bulk price.

I do this with DVR capture cards and external capture devices (our products are linux-based, so I end up tearing apart lots of

No, not really. You're someone who breaks things down? That's great, I do it too for a fortune 500 company serving 40 million customers. And I sound a hell of a lot like those folks when I'm breaking open new kits we get in. I also know people like you who know everything, but are boring as hell to watch as they use spectrum analyzers, oscilloscopes and multimeters to trace out circuits and see how crap works. I'd rather have someone who may know a little less, but at least is entertaining to watch.

Agreed. The lens on the CCD most likely would be a significant expense. I'm honestly surprised they included a LI-ION battery (looks to be ~1000-1500mAh) when they could have used a few 1.5v batteries watch batteries for cheaper. Second highest expense for the unit was probably the LCD display.

I think i found the model they where using A810 Wcdma 3G. It cost about $35 when buying a single unit.
But you could get it for less than $25 if you order atleast 500, and i also think you could reduce that price when buying without the cover. If they did well in negotiating I'm guessing around $10-20/unit

Looking at this example of a bottom-of-the-barrel phone and saying "hey, how come fancy smartphones cost so much" is like looking at the cheapest of Chinese-made cars and saying "how come that BMW over there costs so much"

No one. They're most likely A) using prepaid SIMs, B) not set up on the provider's side to be allowed service from international origins. The SIM just acts as an identifier, it doesn't actually provide service. When the device registers on the provider's network, the SIM is used as an identifier to the Home Subscriber Service (HSS), which stores all of the feature information. In most cases this information will get cached in a call application server which actually provides telephony service. If a call com

I'd think they'd get a better, more wide-ranging PR boost if they just stuck $50 bills in their magazines instead. Everyone will try to be one of the lucky 1,000 people who gets one, and most will fail to do so.

Really, if you want a low-end Android device, you can get one for damn near nothing. How about an Alcatel Venture from Virgin Mobile for $50... No contract, buy as many as you want, ready to use Android device. Or how about a 7" Tablet for $50 [walmart.com] from everybody's favorite retailer?

... only put 1000 of these on newsstands in NY and LA. Nothing in flyover country, nothing for subscribers.I've been looking all over for one of these for tinkering -- should be possible to sideload an app at the very least, and it looks like a spare BB trackball might make navigation of menus possible (I think I have an old Crackberry floating around here somewhere).

If nothing else, this looks like a fun device to hack: break it, and you've lost a few bucks at worst, and the LiON battery alone is worth th

You think you can decimate our industry?! You think you can reduce us from journalists to mere "content creators"?! You think you can take our work and stick it in your little glowing devices?! WE'LL SHOW YOU! WE'LL TAKE YOUR LITTLE GLOWY SMARTPHONE AND GLUE IT RIGHT INSIDE OUR MAGAZINE.

Nobody complained about the environmental side.
Yes, it is cool to find a half digested phone for free, but many of those phones will actually land in the trash after 60 seconds of use.
We were promised to get disposable advert displays in the future, but all we get is a fake.

but imagine if I had said "iPhone is the shit". Oh, gee, I'd be a stupid fanboy, right?

If iOS was free and flexible enough for a project like this, you'd have a point. It would be "the shit". But it's not, it's locked-down proprietary garbage meant to keep Apple in control of every device that runs it.

On my Android phone I need to change some paramters in dhcp.conf. It is apparently owned by root.

To do so, I apparently need to identify a vulnerability in a binary which will lead to root privilege escalation.

What's locked-down now?

Why did you buy your phone from such a consumer-hostile company if you wanted to do such things? If you want Android, you have plenty to choose from, the complete continuum from locked down systems that brick or factory reset themselves after installing an unauthorized bootstrap all the way to ones where you just plug it in and do a few adb commands. That's part of the beauty: you have choice.

With Apple you have no choice, at least non-superficial choices. You can get the locked down iPhone 5 in black or th